But shortly after the Challenger blew up there were jokes everywhere about it, including jokes about the dead crew members.
Not me, but my brother…
When we were young, I guess there was a lot on the news about South Africa and aparthied. One day my brother horrified us all by saying something about “all those monkeys” they kept talking about in South Africa. After some careful questioning, we discovered that, since our recent trip to the zoo, he thought aparthied meant “prehensile”. Obviously he didn’t recall the word prehensile but he thought the news was always talking about monkeys who could use their tails.
Oh, and since you mentioned Skylab… back in the '70s or whatever, when it was coming down, my aunt was completely paranoid that it was going to fall from the sky and kill my cousins. She wouldn’t let them play outside till it fell, “just in case”.
Me too, totally. I always imagined people running underground along train tracks, or riding in coal cart-type things. I didn’t see a subway until I was 13, that probably didn’t help.
I thought this too.
In Oro-Medonte township (Simcoe County, Ontario) we have a family cottage near a church, called the African Episcopal Church, which was said to be the ‘end station on the Underground Railway’ - it was built by a community of escaped ex-slaves. It’s a historic site and usually locked - I always wanted to see the inside because I thought there would be a mini subway station in there (and when I did see the inside, I was horribly disappointed!)
My mom had an even better one - she grew up in Toronto during WW2, and heard that on the other side of Yonge St. in Toronto there were Germans. She assumed that this meant that WW2 was “happening” there, right on the other side of Yonge St. - and since she was Jewish, that she’d be killed if she dared to walk east of Yonge. She hated going to the east half of the city for years and years because of this child-hood phobia, long after she knew it was absurd.
I was old enough to know that they weren’t literal gorillas, but I still thought they were called “Gorillas” kind of like the Black Panther Party or the Tamil Tigers. You know the Nicaragua Gorillas.
Yeppers.
And when I, a Protestant kid, first heard about the Stations of the Cross, the image in my head was of train stations, and I envisioned a kiddie train going from one to the next. Toot, toot, all aboard!
Oh, and the holy family’s ‘flight to Egypt’ - as a kid, I wondered how that worked, when the Wright Brothers’ first flight wasn’t until 1903.
And I wondered how they could have a Pilot named Pontius back then, before there were planes.
I was confused as to why the Army would get into a fight over a Grenada.
I don’t remember just how young I was, but some teacher talking about classical mythology mentioned Hades offhand.
I didn’t know what the word meant and when I got home, I asked my father about Hades.
Well, he thought I said “Haiti.” He’s a racist sumbitch, so he goes off on a rant about how it’s an awful, awful place, full of poor black people, and hotter’n’hell.
It took me a while to get that straightened out.
At the end of the cold war people were always talking about the Iron Curtain. I thought the Iron Curtain was an actual thing, like a big wall separating the Communist countries from the rest of Europe, but entirely made of iron and pleated to look like a fabric curtain. After all, the Berlin Wall was a real thing, right?
Speaking of the Berlin Wall, I thought that it went clear across Germany, separating east from west, and that it was just bad luck that it happened to go right through the middle of Berlin.
East Hampton?
Ditto. My brother asked me if I wanted to watch the watergate special on the TV - I told him that sounded boring if it was just a bunch of water going over a dam.
I was eight years old when the first Gulf War started. I remember hearing reports about it on the news, and wondering why the Persians were so big on golf.
When Nixon was being impeached my little sister said “He’s the president. He can do anything he wants.” We set her strait on that, but then there was a show about Andrew Johnson being impeached, and even though it was on after her bedtime she insisted on staying up so she could see the part where “they throw the peaches at him.”
I was a child in 1974, and I overheard the evening news broadcast, which was covering the invasion of Cyprus. I fully expected to see soldiers marching past our suburban home, which happened to be on Cypress Lane.
Very similar story here.
I was probably 8 or so when the scandal broke. My parents were watching the news, and they were talking about Watergate…in that same newscast, there was also story about a flood somewhere, and in that story, there was a bit of film, showing a fence which was mostly underwater. Somehow, my little brain stuck together “Watergate” and that underwater fence, and I was certain, for some time, that the two were the same story.
My older brother and two older sisters heard that “every 4th child in the world was Chinese”. Since I was the 4th child, I had to be Chinese. They would talk to me in “Chinese” and I would cry because I did not understand them.
I was 5 when Skylab fell. I overheard just enough about it on the news to convince me that it was going to fall right on my house, and was very upset with my parents that they wouldn’t let us all sleep in the basement.
No, it was made of chainmail, I was sure I’d seen pictures of it. (I had a rich fantasy life as a child.) 